This 60TB SSD will blow your mind, but don't forget to backup

Samsung, eat your heart out…

Shares

There's been plenty of storage news emerging, due to the fact that the Flash Memory Summit is currently underway in Santa Clara, and Seagate has certainly come up with a headline-grabbing development: a massive 60TB SSD.

Yes, you read that right, this is a solid-state drive which uses 3D TLC NAND (that stacks storage cells vertically to cram more in) from Micron to offer no less than 60TB of storage. That's four times the size of Samsung's monster 15TB SSD which became available to buy recently.

However, before we get too carried away, at the moment this SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drive is just a tech demo, so no one is going to be able to purchase one any time soon. The full release of the drive won't pitch up until next year – and even then it will be available in limited quantities for a very niche audience.

And of course it will boast an exorbitant price – the aforementioned Samsung 15TB model, for example, runs to almost $9,700 (around £7,400, AU$12,600).

Storage of the future

Still, it's a hugely impressive achievement for Seagate, and while this is obviously aimed at the enterprise market and server usage, it's an indicator of how we can expect SSD storage capacity to expand in the future.

Seagate observed that the 60TB drive is big enough to play host to 12,000 DVD movies or some 400 million photos – and it's looking at upping the stakes to a 100TB model in the future.

The company also revealed that its Nytro XP7200, an 8TB NVMe SSD, will enter mass production in the final quarter of this year.

The XP7200 basically utilises four separate SSDs with four separate controllers, with the idea being to provide processing power up to four times faster than rival drives without the higher cost and latency that you'd see using a PCIe switch or bridge. The drive will offer blazing read speeds of up to 10GB/s.